The president’s current favorable public approval ratings match the highs he enjoyed during his first year in office, but he need only look at recent history to grasp the challenges ahead. Since CQ Roll Call began tracking presidential success in 1953, every two-term president has seen his success on floor votes decline in the second term. read more...
CQ Roll Call (previously Congressional Quarterly) has analyzed the voting behavior of members of Congress since 1945. The three principal vote studies currently produced — presidential support, party unity and voting participation — have been conducted in a consistent manner since 1953. The graphics above show the historical trends for each of these studies, including the most recent data from 2012. read more...
Over the past 30 years, Congress has passed and the president signed 37 laws that raised the ceiling on the amount of money the federal government is permitted to borrow. With the federal government again due to reach its borrowing ceiling as early as mid-Febuary, President Obama has said he will not negotiate with Congressional Republicans over the debt limit, which allows the government to pay its bills and avoid defaulting on its obligations. In response, Republicans scaled back their expectations, abandoning their insistence on dollar-for-dollar spending cuts and instead trying to force the Senate to pass a budget. read more...
Faced with a New Year’s deadline, Congress and the White House reached an last-minute agreement to avert the impending tax hikes and spending cuts collectively known as the fiscal cliff. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the tax cuts without limiting spending will add $4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, as outlined above. read more...
On May 21, the House approved allocations, known as 302(b)s, for fiscal 2014 appropriations. The Democratic…
As of 2010, just over 40 million people living in the United States were born in…
The Senate approved a cloture motion Thursday night on an internet sales tax bill by a…
The Data Mine, CQ Roll Call's multimedia blog, features interactive visualizations of government and congressional data along with in-depth, policy-oriented analysis of the latest facts and figures.
